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Bloodless
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 27 2025
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the ruined city of Eryndor, people wake with blood in their mouths and silence where their lives used to be. They forget their children. They forget the shape of their own faces in the mirror. Their bodies keep walking, keep working, keep smiling at strangers on the street, but the person who lived inside them is already gone. The survivors have a word for the ones it happens to. They call them the hollowed, and every morning there are more.
Something in the ruins is feeding, and it does not drink blood. It drinks memory. Worse, it keeps what it takes, stored in thin strips of marked flesh and a cold blue light that hums like a dying sign. The survivors gave the hunger an old name out of a book almost no one remembers how to read. They call it Dracula, because the truth has no face and no shape, and a familiar monster is easier to hunt than a thing you cannot even picture.
Silas Marrow investigates the dead for a living. He walks into an alley off Harrow Lane and finds a body with no wound, no blood, and a translucent strip on its tongue that moves when the light touches it. The eyes are wrong, glazed with a thin clear film like the surface of a cooling burn. By the time he understands what he is looking at, he has already started to vanish. His wife's name is gone. His mother's face has blurred to nothing. He keeps a notebook now, writing down everything he cannot afford to lose, because the pen is the last thing standing between him and the quiet.
He is not the only one still fighting. In the flooded basements and lamplit barricades of the dead city, a handful of survivors led by a hard woman named Mara have found the one weapon that works against the hunger. They speak their memories out loud. They make each other witnesses. A name held in six mouths is harder to steal than a name held in one. It is a fragile, exhausting defense, it costs them people they love, and one by one it is pushed to the breaking point while the thing outside learns their patterns and waits.
What the survivors are really defending is not their lives. It is the small, specific things that made those lives worth keeping. The sound of a voice. A face across a table. The weight of a hand in the dark. When one of them starts to slip, the others crowd close and say the lost thing back until it holds, or until it does not. Some nights they win a name. Some nights they bury one. Silas fills page after page, knowing that ink can be burned and paper can be lost, and that the only record that has ever truly lasted is the kind carried inside another person who refuses to let go.
Because the thing in the ruins is smarter than a monster. Behind the pale figure that walks the streets stands a colder and older intelligence, an Architect assembling a machine out of everything the city forgets. The Tower that loomed over the early nights was only the beginning. The Spire is what came after it, a structure of steel and glass and appetite, built for one purpose. It was built to make forgetting permanent, and it is almost finished.
Bloodless is a work of literary horror about memory, identity, and the terrible mercy of forgetting. It asks what we owe the people we love, what survives of us once the record burns, and whether a self is anything more than the story we manage to keep telling. The dread here is slow and patient and human. There are no easy rescues and no clean escapes, only tired people in a dying city, refusing to let each other disappear.
For readers who want their horror atmospheric, character-driven, and quietly devastating, Eryndor is waiting. Step inside, and try not to forget why you came.
The dead do not forget. That is the cruelty of it. The living lose their names by morning.
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